"For us, artificial intelligence is the new frontier," said Marc DeBevoise, who recently became the new CEO of OverDrive. As a digital publishing giant known for its e-book lending app Libby (which covers 115 countries, 92,000 public libraries, and academic institutions), OverDrive is at the forefront of combating the surge in AI-generated content.
Facing increasing AI content challenges, Libby is preparing to introduce an "AI content control feature." This feature allows readers to manually select options in the app settings to filter out AI-created content, AI narrated audiobooks, machine translations, and AI-generated artwork. DeBevoise emphasized: "We need to inform people what content is available and how it was created."
Striking a Balance Between "Rejecting AI" and "Embracing Technology"
Libby's move aims to provide users with the "opt-out" right while also leveraging the benefits of AI in content recommendations and localization. In fact, Libby faced strong backlash last year after introducing an AI book discovery feature, making the company more cautious in its digital transformation.
Looking back, OverDrive, founded 40 years ago, has gone through the floppy disk and CD-ROM era and launched Libby in 2017. Today, Libby's catalog includes over 6 million books, with more than 1 billion total checkouts. DeBevoise pointed out that since most books were published before the 2020 or 2022 explosion of large language models (LLMs), most of the content in the catalog is still purely human-made.
However, the industry ecosystem is rapidly deteriorating:
Amazon: Since 2023, it has limited self-publishing authors' daily upload volume to combat AI abuse.
Kobo: Last month, it rejected nearly half of the self-publishing book requests due to AI concerns, and its CEO stated the industry is facing a "flood."
Classification Tags and Opportunities for Audiobooks in the AI Era
Different from platforms like Amazon that allow authors to upload directly, OverDrive introduces content through the self-publishing intermediary Draft to Digital. Since this intermediary allows AI books that have undergone "extensive human editing" to go online, some AI content inevitably entered Libby. In response, OverDrive has decided to not use AI detectors to forcibly block content, but instead rely on publishers to mark content through standardized metadata themselves.
Although literary critics point out that AI translation has inherent flaws in literary works, DeBevoise believes that as long as used properly, AI can greatly reduce barriers to information access.
Especially in the rapidly growing audiobook business (accounting for 15% of Libby's catalog but contributing to about half of the usage), AI's localization capabilities show great potential. DeBevoise said that while the "human touch" of real voice actors is irreplaceable and the recording costs are reasonable, translating an audiobook into dozens or even hundreds of languages would be prohibitively expensive using traditional methods, which is exactly where AI shines.
The AI filter that Libby is about to launch will serve as a test—while ensuring readers' right to know and choose, how to use technology to eliminate the language barrier will determine the future of this established digital company in the AI era.
